Day 15 – Siem Reap

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It was about 6:20am when (after having nothing left in my stomach) that I decided to wander downstairs in search of anyone awake from contiki that may have had Maxlon or something that would stop this hell.
I found Joey, Jules and Cara. Joey and Cara both had early flights home and they were just heading down for breakfast. I decided to sit with them for a bit as Jules had all the tablets that I needed but we thought we would see Cara and Joey off first.
After we said our farewells Jules got the tablets for me, I took them and within about 30minutes I was already feeling better; I even managed a little bit of sleep. We decided to get up and have some breakfast and spend th rest of the morning by the pool. We were by the pool until about 10:00am when I decided to start saying my goodbyes as Mr Chen was picking me up at 11:00am for my transfer to the airport. It was sad to say goodbye to the people you’ve spent the last 14days with; I really dislike the end of Contiki.
Mr Chen picked me up at 11:00am and drove me the 15minutes to the Siem Reap Airport. On the way he was telling me that (according to him) there are four things in life you need to be successful:
1. An Education
2. A Job
3. A family
4. Property
To which I replied “well, I’m halfway there”. He dropped me off and I made my way into the airport where my hellish day continued. I checked in my bags (which took about 45minutes, they were so slow) then I made my way to pay my US$25 to leave the country, departure tax apparently. I went through security and passport control without any problems and made my way to my departure gate. When I got there I was informed that my flight had been delayed from 1:00pm to 2:05pm. That wasn’t too bad so I got myself some lunch, a toasted chicken, cheese and bacon sandwich. As I sat down the Contiki people walked in as some of the group was continuing on and their flight to Vietnam was at 1:45pm. . We got to have a bit more of a chat which was nice but then it was goodbye time all over again. I got my hugs and they were on their way and I thought ‘well, not long until I will be too’.
Well, 2:05pm came and went and we were then informed that there was a further delay due to ‘technical issues’ with the plane. Great, the second time within seven months for me, I couldn’t believe it.
So we waited longer as they “attempted to fix the problem”…fail. It got to the point where they informed us that the plane wasn’t fixable and we weren’t going anywhere today. The communication of the airline was terrible. To avoid lying they just told us nothing instead. Eventually after a few hours they led us out of the gate area, collected our passports, collected our luggage and after some more waiting around we got our passports back, outside of the airport as the staff of Malaysian Airlines decided to hand our passports to one of the passengers to hand out! We couldn’t believe it! Not only did we not know what was going on but what they had just done was completely illegal; taking our passports outside of the airport without us knowing then just handing them to some random person, we were horrified. Through all the anger and confusion though, I’d met some really nice Aussies. There was Sam, Andrej and Jonathan from Melbourne and Jackie and Nicole from Adelaide.; all lovely people. Eventually we got on buses and got taken to The Allson Angkor Hotel; a very nice, large hotel. My room was huge, it had the double bed, a desk and all this other furniture which I did not need. We had an hour to get refreshed, have a shower and get cleaned up after a day of sitting in an airport before we walked 300m down the road to the hotels sister hotel where they provided us with a buffet dinner. We had our meal and walked back to our hotel where we had a few drinks, and chatted then decided to hit the hay. I’d had only about 3hours sleep in the last 48hours. Between getting up for sunrise over Angkor Wat then the food poisoning then all this I was knackered, I’d had it, I was completely and absolutely spent. As soon as I hit the pillow I was out like a light.

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